Advance guide on finding link opportunities

By Sef
Posted On
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
//

Links are still
important; it is still being used by search engines as an important ranking factor to determine how a webpage will be placed in SERP depending on relevancy
and ranking power. These links are counted as votes for websites so search
engines can determine which websites that have natural and unnatural link
building method. Having said that, instead of building links for your website
in a large scale, why don’t you focus your 50% effort in finding link
opportunities where you can naturally and ethically build links to your website, right?

Finding link
opportunities can take most of your time but the benefits you can get from it
is definitely satisfying. But this post can help you make your campaign uncomplicated
and trouble free. Also, since you will not be aggressively linking links, you
should not be worried too much about Google penalty. So let’s get started.

Use Alerts

Google alert is
the best way to track your web mentions from other websites all over the web.
This can help you discover new fresh content with your brand name or name being
mentioned in content. You can also monitor if someone is talking bad about your
brand or name using this alert. By doing this, you can see if they are linking
to you or just mentioning you without link that points to your site. In this
way, you can reach out to the webmaster of that website to ask if they can
include your link in the post that you are mentioned on.

The benefits of using it for link opportunities

You can find
unlinked mentions turn into links

You can discover
new people in your industry that you can connect with

You can increase
the ranking power flowing to your site

Another great
tool to monitor your mentions is to use Mention.net, a similar to Google alerts
but the difference is it can track your mentions from different source such as
Social, Forum and Web mentions which are absolutely helpful if you are looking
to expanding your contacts and alliances. But the sad thing about this is, this
is not a free tool like Google alerts so you have to at least pay the service.

Check your competitors’ links

Conducting a
quick review on link profile of your competitors can give you relevant and high
quality link prospects that you can also gain in an easy way. Obviously, they
would not want to have crappy links in their link profile so you can assume
that 70% of their links are white hat and high quality. In this way, you can
sort of figure out what kind of link building approach they are implementing
and once you see the websites that can give you quality links, you can do your
own thing to contact the webmaster and request to have your link in a form of
info-graphic, video presentation, slide presentation or content hosted on their
website.

You can use
Majestic SEO, Opensite Explorer or Ahrefs’ backlink checker tools to see what
kind of links they have and you can check their referring domains section to
identify if they link they acquired is editorial or non-editorial. In this way,
you will easily figure out the top referring pages to your competitors’ links
so if they got the links from those resource pages, you will absolutely get a
chance to link from them as well.

Tips in using
your competitors’ links for link opportunities:

Pick the top and
relevant referring pages only to avoid having problem with low quality domains

Choose the ones
with strong social and readers’ engagement to widen your online exposure

Broken link building

Another way to
find link opportunity is to find broken links on high ranking websites in your
industry. It is a way of helping the webmaster of the websites that you will
find with broken links. Since broken links can sometime annoy internet users, its
better not to have them at all and since higher ranking websites can pass
authority to your website, the benefit of practicing it to increase the domain
authority of your website is definitely a good idea. Although you can’t be sure
whether it will bring any traffic to your website, it’s still worth doing this
for your website.

If you are
looking for broken links, you can look for resource pages in your industry and
run a quick check on those pages to see if you will find any broken link. In
this way, you will have a good reason why you are contacting the webmaster in
the first place.

Once you spotted
the pages that have broken links, you can then send an email to the webmaster
of those websites saying that you've spotted a broken link on their resource
pages and you would like to offer a link for replacement

Finally, finding
link opportunities is a better way of building links to your website. Although
it does not put your website on top of search for your target keyword in a
short period of time, you can be sure that your website will not be penalized
due to this campaign. Also, finding link opportunities will not consume most of
your time so while waiting for new link opportunities, focus on updating your
website in a regular basis that will help your audience the most.

Joseph Gojo Cruzis the author ofRankingElite, aPhilippine-based Online Marketing
blog. Joseph has been working inSEOindustry for over 3 years fromwebsite audit,link and content development,social mediaandsearch
engine optimization. Connect with Joseph on Google+, Twitter,
and Facebook. Joseph is also a contributor
onSEJ
and Ahrefs.